Audubon Then and Now
“The study of ornithology must be a journey of pleasure,” Audubon wrote.1 His own journey gave us the spectacular The Birds of America. It marked the beginning of modern ornithology, too, bringing naturalists out to where the birds really lived, to see and study. Audubon’s vision—to erase the boundary between ornithology and art—was realized in his historic achievement. Yet there were times, early in his career, when he feared that he would die unknown.
His life itself is one of the great American adventure stories. A passionate rambler, he tramped across the country from shortly after its founding to the middle of the nineteenth century, when Americans were poised to overspread and settle the continent. He met everyone from frontiersmen to presidents and wandered through a wilderness that was teeming with animals in numbers almost unimaginable today. No artist or naturalist traveled as far or saw as much. His art and writings form a unique kind of travelogue of America when it was new. Audubon had a powerful love for his country, and he understood how fast it was changing. In middle age, he looked back on an earlier trip down the Ohio River:
When I think of these times, and call back to my mind the grandeur and beauty of those almost uninhabited shores; when I picture to myself the dense and lofty summits of the forests, that everywhere spread along the hills and overhung the margins of the stream, . . . when I reflect that all this grand portion of our Union, instead of being in a state of nature, is now more or less covered with villages, farms, and towns, . . . when I remember that these extraordinary changes have all taken place in the short period of twenty years, I pause, wonder, and although I know all to be fact, can scarcely believe its reality.
Whether these changes are for the better or for the worse, I shall not pretend to say.2
He was a man of his time and a man ahead of his time—a hunter who could kill a hundred birds in a day and an early environmentalist who worried about the survival of species from birds to buffalo. He probably discovered about twenty-three new bird species, although the exact number is hard to know.3 Taxonomy in Audubon’s lifetime was in its infancy, and today DNA analysis is leading to frequent revisions. Audubon was never able to depict all the North American birds. Ornithologists now count more than nine hundred species. But his gift to the world is greater even than his life’s work. It is also the legacy that his work has inspired.
The Audubon Society was founded in 1886 by the naturalist George Bird Grinnell, who was tutored by Lucy Audubon when he was a boy. Today the National Audubon Society includes hundreds of state chapters, nature centers, and sanctuaries. While Audubon the man collected birds, the Audubon Society is dedicated to protecting and preserving them. For the twenty-first-century naturalist, bird watching has replaced shooting, and photography provides the close-ups that John James Audubon craved. The mission has evolved.
The Audubon Society and many other bird and wildlife organizations have inherited John James Audubon’s concern for bird species under threat and work to save them by educating the public and advocating for protective laws. Some species, such as the Carolina parakeet and the passenger pigeon, are gone forever. But others that Audubon admired—the whooping crane, the roseate spoonbill, the brown pelican—have been pulled back from the brink of extinction.
Naturalists in Audubon’s day worked in isolation, but now the Internet has brought birders together nationwide and worldwide. Websites enable organizations to sponsor global bird counts, track migrations, provide field guides, and play recorded birdcalls. Not only professional ornithologists but citizen-scientists, amateurs, contribute important information. How pleased Audubon would have been to know this, for he was self-taught and a citizen-scientist himself.
He is buried at Trinity Church Cemetery in New York City, not far from Minniesland. A tall monument over his grave is carved with birds and mammals, flowers and leaves.
“In imagination I am at this moment rambling along the banks of some murmuring streamlet . . . while the warblers and other sylvan choristers, equally fond of their wild retreats, are skipping in all the freedom of nature around me.”4
44. Blue-winged Teal by John James Audubon.